Rly sry, I did an antisemitism

Also, news from HanukkahLand: The fight for a dominant Jewish stereotype

IN WHICH:

• I give Ben Shapiro the CULTURE BOY attention he deserves.

• Someone gets dybbuked.

• Hersh Hyman takes a professional interest in the HanukkahLand IP.

• We get a preview of tonight’s smackdown at the StereoDome™.

1.

I figured out the meaning of Hanukkah and it’s only the second night!

In a seven-year-old video called “Ben Shapiro Explains Hanukkah,”¹ Shappy Gilmore explains it this way:

First, that when secularism attempts to destroy religion, it must be fought. Second, that sometimes the violation of rights necessitates fighting even our own brethren. Politics matter. Finally, that Jewishness isn’t just about latkes and bagels. It’s about observance and adherence to the Torah.

Sincerely, I am sorry to keep giving Ben Shapiro a platform, but I have a problem. I find him fascinating and, also, I watch everything YouTube tells me to.

To start with, it’s interesting that “secularism” is the word Shap Attaq chooses for his bogeyman against Hanukkah. I’d say it’s even a stretch, because whatever can be said about the Seleucid Empire, they were not secular. The Maccabean revolt was in opposition to Hellenization of the Jews, in other words, the Empire’s slow-cooker strategy to force Jews to worship the gods of Olympus and make pizza with an airy, spongy crust. Nowhere else in the story (not even in Reb Shapiro’s retelling) is there any mention of secularism.

So who are we fighting, Ben?

2.

People who say things like “antisemitism is on the rise” have no idea (1) how confusing it is to be a Jew and (2) how entertaining antisemitism is.

One of the top posts on Substack the other day was called “Getting Dybbuked can ruin your day”.² I clicked because it was the top post in Culture and I read everything Substack tells me to. A “dybbuk” is a demon from Jewish folklore that overtakes someone’s body, and according to this Substack post, “this dead jew spirit demon that can take you over will be blamed for just that, possessing a person, and it will be captured on video, 'take over' of someone prominent, or someone who is prominent in public vision (they may be a bystander to some event on-going).”

Interesting!

The author of the post is Clif High, a futurist, technologist, and author of Six Pack Sixties: Getting Six Pack Abs in Your Sixties and, like every other crackpot weirdo on the internet, he runs a popular Substack.

3.

As a secular Jew myself, there’s a grab bag of moments I remember feeling, truly feeling, antisemitism. I wrote about one of these moments in 2023, after the death of my grandfather, who was the last person in my family to speak Yiddish, and which reminded me of the moment in third grade when George Clank called me a dumb Jew.

Another time I truly felt antisemitism was when I performed it myself. I was a teenager, maybe a little younger, but very new to “jokes” and “humor.” My stepmother was at the kitchen table discussing Barbra Streisand, who had just married James Brolin. “I don’t think I could marry Barbra Streisand,” I said. “Her nose would take up half the house.”

Nobody laughed, but we did have a long conversation.

4.

Yesterday, I got an email from Hersh Hyman, the only surviving partner from the legendary New York advertising agency Hyman, Hickman, and Scotch³. He wrote, “I just had to let you know, I love what you’re doing...” He let this one hang with an ellipsis and several paragraph returns. “This HanukkahLand stuff, it’s really good. Let me ask, have you ever thought about a marketing plan?”

5.

In one of Clif High’s videos called “First Principles Woo,” he describes the power structure of the universe:

At the top we have the Elohim, the space aliens, the Anunnaki, the devas, whatever you wanna call them. Then underneath them we have their worship cult, which you can call the Jews, but it’s more than that. It’s all the globalists, it’s all those kinds of people.

You know this already, but as he speaks he scrawls a diagram onto a whiteboard behind him with a pronounced American flag in the top right-hand corner, in a room that I’m guessing smells like yogurt.

The Elohim worship cult are not Jews. They make Jews in order to have a protective layer around them. They created the ritual of Judaism. They created it as an offshoot of their mind control processes for humans.

It’s a little rough, sure, but also some very keen worldbuilding. I could see this appearing as a subplot in season two of Dune: Prophecy. The problem is you can tell by his expression that he really, truly believes it.

6.

One of the things that I find the weirdest about Judaism is how much of the institution of Judaism is based on this us-versus-them mentality. When Ben Shapiro says that a key lesson from Hanukkah is that “sometimes the violation of rights necessitates fighting even our own brethren,” he refers, at least in part, to Mattathias, the Jewish priest who killed a Hellenized Jew and ran into the woods, starting this whole Hanukkah thing.

7.

Fortunately, there are no stereotypes in HanukkahLand, except in the StereoDome™, where every Thursday-through-Sunday you can see Jewish stereotypes battle each other for a dairy-free ice cream cake. Tonight, NoseStradamus™ battles MoneyMan™ in an extreme battle for all time. Find out who wins in tomorrow’s news from HanukkahLand.

1. I won’t be linking to the video for … personal reasons.

2. I won’t be linking to the post or any of Clif High’s content as the Elohim hath forbade it.

3. “Hickman was like a brother to me,” he wrote, by way of introduction. “Scotch wasn’t a person, it’s just what we liked to do after five.”